Wednesday, October 25, 2006

BC Journal - 26-October-2006

I'm still planning to fully explore jewelcrafting. So I skilled up mining with my undead priest in the beta to 300, and used the metals gained that way, plus all the stuff I brought over from the real servers, to skill up jewelcrafting to 275. Technically I am not stuck there, but to progress I need a lot more rare gems, which I probably can only get by extracting them from thorium ore. Sigh, it seems I'll be spending a lot of time mining radioactive thorium before I get jewelcrafting to 300.

To change my mind from mining, I joined a group for the blood furnace part of Hellfire Citadel. That place is still bugged with flying orcs. Unfortunately an even more serious bug makes it impossible to kill the final boss, unless you manage to do so on the first try. If you wipe, like we did, the boss attacks you too early on the next fight, and can't even be targeted, causing a certain wipe again and again.

But all wasn't bad, the second boss dropped my first socketed item: Bloody surgeon's gloves. They have +18 sta, +20 int, +7 spi, and +31 on healing. And besides these already not bad stats, they have two sockets, a red and a blue one. So I went to Thralmar and bought socketable gems at the jewel vendor there. I don't know if that vendor will remain there in the release version, or whether jewelcrafters will be the only source of such gems in the expansion. Anyway, you socket the gems by shift-rightclicking on the item, which makes a window pop up. Then you can transfer gems from your inventory to the item's sockets. I chose a +13 healing red gem and a +2 mana per 5 seconds blue gem. By using the gems of the same color as the sockets, I gained an additional +3 spirit bonus. If I had wanted to use lets say a +6 int yellow gem instead, I would have foregone the +3 spirit bonus. Gems you socket can't be removed, but they can be replaced by other gems, which destroys the first gem.

But probably the best discovery of the evening was that the meeting stones now have a summoning functionality. I'm not quite sure how many people you need to summon, but if you are in a group, standing next to a meeting stone, and one group member is far away, you can target the group member and click on the meeting stone. That opens a portal just like a warlocks portal, through which the group member can be summmoned. Nifty! I just hope the LFG interface becomes more popular in the expansion, in the beta which is comparatively empty players don't use it much. But with an improved LFG interface *and* a way to summon people, starting a 5-man dungeon group could become a lot easier.